Finding Changemakers
Place a group of student filmmakers in a country they have never visited and give them four weeks to make a documentary, and most of them want to start shooting on day one. Robin Canfield, co-founder and director of global operations for Actuality Abroad, makes them wait a week. The reasoning makes up the core learning experience of this episode: students do not struggle with gear, they need to slow down and learn storytelling.
Over fifteen years, Robin’s program has helped emerging filmmakers create more than two hundred short documentaries about local communities in more than twenty countries. Is is also the author of Purpose Driven Documentaries, published by Focal Press. Recently, he joined us on the TV Matters Podcast to talk about how to teach storytelling, and almost everything he said points in the same direction: research and learn about your story first, and the filmmaking follows.
A Storytelling Teacher, Not a Film Teacher
Ask Robin what he does for work and he’ll say, “I teach storytelling.” Documentaries are just the vehicle. It sounds like a modest distinction until you follow it out. Tools change constantly. The camera a student learns on will be dated in a few years, the software will update past recognition, and AI in the edit bay is already rewriting parts of the job. But good storytelling is human and universal. A student who takes the time to dig for a meaningful story can pick up any camera to tell it.
Week One Has No Camera at all
Actuality Aboard is a four week program in which students (who may or may not be enrolled in a university) travel to a foreign country to make documentaries. The locations are mostly chosen by Robin and his wife Aubrie. Rob and Aubrie search for people they call changemakers, defined as local people building projects to positively impact their communities. These projects include teaching young women boxing in Nairobi, creating bicycle pedal-power technology in Guatemala, or a rainforest conservation effort in Belize. While Robin doesn’t pick the specific story that the students will tell, he picks the organizations and communities with which his students will work.
The first week of every program is named research and relationship building, and there is no filming in it at all. Students spend the week meeting people, doing pre-interviews, and learning the place, often led by a liaison from the partner organization who opens doors that would never open to foreigners knocking cold. The single goal by Friday is to know who the protagonist of the documentary will be.
It is worth naming why that is radical for a classroom. In traditional 16 week college semesters students rush to production, and most school setups don’t have the luxury of time to give students this freedom. Robin slows things down so the student crew understands who they are filming, which turns the camera into a storytelling tool rather than a lesson about shutter speed.
Telling the Truth Is the Craft
Robin teaches a full lesson on ethical storytelling which includes concepts about getting exploitation, and listening to the subject rather than accepting everything they say as truth immediately. He described filming in the Kibera slum in Nairobi with a local NGO that uses tennis to win kids scholarships, and rounding a corner to find tourists photographing residents on a paid slum walking tour. The discomfort of that image was a lesson. On one hand, the tourists were paying a local for the tour, on the other hand they were not asking permission of the people they were photographing.
Robin’s ethical boundary starts with getting informed consent so the subject genuinely understands: everyone recognizable on camera knows the film will live online, possibly forever, and that even a deleted upload may already be downloaded. He is most careful with children. When a school in Cambodia asked that no kids be shown, the crew answered with a shot of a busy playground seen entirely through a forest of moving feet, a constraint that produced one of his favorite images. The point he keeps returning to is that consent and context are how you earn the right to tell someone’s story, which makes ethics a storytelling skill, not a release form.
Edit the Story You Found, Not the One You Scripted
The last week of the program is all about editing, filming pickups, and screening the film to subjects. As an editor, I did not understand how a beginner could cut a ten-minute documentary in five days until Robin walked me through his process. The editor starts on day one of filming, at which time the trip still has several weeks before wrapping production. By the second week the crew writes a treatment that Robin can read. At the end of the shooting weeks they watch a visual assembly with no interviews in it yet, just to find out how much of the story already reads in the b-roll alone. The b-roll shows a process. You can connect a bunch of sound bites together but it’ll make for a boring story. That’s why Robin has students show him the film with no sound bites first.
This process is a little different to news reporting, as demonstrated in EditMentor’s news course, taught by Doug Green. In news, sometimes sound bites are what’s used to form the spine of the story first.
After completing the scenes pass, Robin’s students create the paper cut: colored note cards for sequences, audio, and visuals, taped across a wall and moved around until the order works. His favorite version happens around two in the morning, one person asleep on a table, another still at the cards, when somebody says “that’s it, that’s it” and the room wakes up. The structure is never decided in advance. It bends to the story they actually captured.
The Real Test Is Whether the Subject Recognizes Their Own Story
Robin respects the reach of an activist filmmaker like Michael Moore, but he holds a firm line with his crews: “they are not the great white hero.” It is not their story to star in.
The measure he actually cares about showed up at the Slum Film Festival in Kenya, which screens at refugee camps across the region. A student film from Actuality Aboard called Slum Dreams won the Slum Voice Award for most accurately portraying real life there. That is the bar he sets: tell the story so well that the person in it wants to go show everyone they know. Not a grade, not a festival, but recognition from the one person who would know if you got it wrong.
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to hear Robin Canfield on finding a protagonist, teaching ethics as craft, and why the best thing a student filmmaker can learn is to put the story before the camera.
